The Republican Party made historic gains in the 2010 elections, winning the majority in the House of Representatives by picking up 63 House seats and drawing within striking distance of a majority in the Senate by adding six seats. Equally important, Republicans picked up a record 680 state legislative seats, giving it its highest number since 1928. Among Republicans, hopes to win back the White House were high heading into the 2012 elections.
A major reason that the Republicans had so much success in 2010 was the much discussed “enthusiasm gap” between party identifiers in the electorate. Gallup reported that 63 percent of Republicans were “more enthusiastic than usual” about the election compared with only 44 percent of Democrats. This 19 percent gap was more than twice as great as the Republican advantage in 1994. But what was rarely mentioned was that this gap was entirely due to Tea Party Republicans. Democrats and non–Tea Party Republicans showed almost identical levels of enthusiasm (44 and 45 percent, respectively). It was the 78 percent of Tea Party Republicans who were “more enthusiastic” that made the difference (Jones 2010). However, Tea Party enthusiasm came at a cost for the Republican Party establishment as Tea Party challengers won primaries in Utah, Kentucky, Delaware, and Nevada against high-ranking current or former Republican officeholders, or in the case of Utah and Alaska, against incumbent Republican Senators. And the Tea Party showed its power immediately after the election, even before its newly elected supporters had taken office, confronting Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and forcing him to back off his support of earmarks. As the Tea Party flexed its political muscle by threatening sitting Republican Senators in the run-up to the 2012 elections, Republican Senators as senior as Orrin Hatch and John McCain moved to the right to head off primary challenges from Tea Party candidates. When Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana did not abandon his moderate positions, he was easily defeated after 36 years in office.
Not surprisingly, given its stridency, attempts to dismiss the Tea Party date back almost to its inception. Liberal and Democratic groups have claimed that the movement is “astroturf.” Then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) emphasized on Tax Day 2009 that the Tea Party was without serious grassroots support, its only funding coming from some of the wealthiest people in America (Fox KTVU San Francisco 2009). Early criticism came not just from Democrats. Republican senator Lindsay Graham in July 2010 declared that the Tea Party is “just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out” (Kleefeld 2010).
The Tea Party movement, however, has proved remarkably resilient and remained a force in the Republican Party. Even though there has been a decline in Tea Party supporters (from 29 to 22 percent of the population since 2010), supporters of the movement still comprise between 45 percent and 55 percent of the Republican Party (NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys aggregate annual data from 2010 to 2013).1 In a late October 2013 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, taken after the government shutdown and the debt ceiling crisis, 23 percent of Americans viewed the Tea Party positively; almost exactly the same percentage rated the Republican Party positively. As Alan Abramowitz points out, because Tea Party supporters are more active than non–Tea Party Republicans, they comprise a significant majority of the active Republican Party. He found that Tea Party supporters made up 63 percent of Republicans who reported contacting an elected official to express an opinion, 65 percent of Republicans who reported giving money to a party or candidate, and 73 percent of Republicans who reported attending a political rally or meeting (Abramowitz 2011).
Establishment attacks on the Tea Party accelerated after Romney’s defeat and 2012 election losses in key Senate races. The Growth and Opportunity Project committee appointed by RNC chair Reince Priebus, in what most saw as a thinly veiled reference to the Tea Party, claimed that “third-party groups that promote purity are hurting our electoral prospects” (Republican National Committee 2013, 54). Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, responded that “with the catastrophic loss of the Republican elite’s hand-picked candidate—the Tea Party is the last best hope America has to restore America’s founding principles” (Tea Party Patriots 2012).
Exchanges between Tea Party and Establishment Republicans in the run-up to the debt ceiling and government shutdown in the fall of 2013 reached new levels of acrimony. Ted Cruz and others further sharpened the divisions within the party as factionalism erupted into civil war. As one Republican Senator said after a closed door meeting with Cruz, “It’s pretty evident it’s never been about a strategy—it’s been about him. That’s unfortunate. I think he’s done our country a major disservice. I think he’s done Republicans a major disservice” (Raju 2013). For his part, Ted Cruz attacked his copartisans, saying, “I think it was unfortunate that you saw multiple members of the Senate Republicans going on television attacking House conservatives, attacking the effort to defund Obamacare, saying it cannot win, it’s a fool’s errand, we will lose, this must fail. That is a recipe for losing the fight, and it’s a shame” (Robillard 2013a).
Understanding the factional divisions within the Republican Party is crucial to understanding contemporary American politics. Much of the academic work on the Tea Party has focused on its ideology, determinants of participation in the movement, and the legitimacy of the movement itself (Ulbig and Macha forthcoming; Perkins and Lavine 2011; Abramowitz 2011; Rae 2011; Skocpol and Williamson 2013), without a broad examination of Tea Party supporters and Tea Party activists and their relationship to other Republicans. This chapter attempts to fill that gap.
We begin by examining the factional conflict between Tea Party and non–Tea Party Republicans, focusing on differences in issue positions and priorities at the mass level of the party. We then turn to similarities and differences between Tea Party supporters in the electorate and Tea Party activists as represented by FreedomWorks subscribers. In any political movement, midlevel activists occupy an important role since they supply the energy in campaigns and the direction of the movement. This is of particular interest in the case of the Tea Party since these groups have been singled out for criticism as the source of “astroturfing.” By comparing the positions and priorities between Tea Party supporters in the electorate and Tea Party organizations, we show that activists and mass identifiers with the Tea Party are remarkably similar in their views. We conclude by examining how FreedomWorks activists responded to the 2012 election. Rather than respond to calls for compromise and adjustment from the Republican establishment, Tea Party activists have become more committed than ever to their ideological approach to politics and to their negative view of the Republican Party and its leaders.
Our national sample is a December 2011 YouGov/Polimetrix survey (CCES). This survey was sent to a sample of 1000 respondents to the CCES November 2010 survey—700 of whom had expressed “very positive” views of the Tea Party at that time and 300 of whom had not. While this gave us a sample that was much more heavily Republican than the U.S. population (69.6 percent Republican, 10.6 percent independents, and 19.4 percent Democrats), weights assigned by YouGov/Polimetrix allow us to approximate a national random sample. It is also appropriate because of our heavy focus on the Republican Party. Our sample of potential Tea Party activists is based on a survey of FreedomWorks subscribers. We received usable surveys from 12,172 respondents. According to the YouGov/Polimetrix survey, FreedomWorks is the largest Tea Party membership group, including 12.9 percent of all of those who rated the Tea Party “very positive.” As the largest Tea Party membership group, FreedomWorks supporters provide a good representation of Tea Party potential activists.2 The survey was sent to the entire FreedomWorks email list of 700,000 subscribers; however, according to the organization, only about 60,000 individuals open any given email, so our response rate based on those opening email is just over 20 percent.3 We conducted the second wave survey of 10,000 wave-1 respondents in spring 2013 and received 2,600 completed surveys.4
Republican Factionalism
In the CCES sample from December 2011, only slightly more than one in five Republicans (counting Republican leaners) were strong Tea Party supporters, but more than 40 percent were “supporters, but not so strong.” Slightly over a third of Republicans were either former Tea Party supporters or “never Tea Party supporters.” In sum, more than 60 percent of all Republican respondents, then, called themselves “Tea Party supporters.”
Consistent with Abramowitz’s findings, Tea Party supporters were much more active than non–Tea Party supporters. In 2008, Tea Party Republicans performed 1.54 activities for the presidential and congressional tickets on average, compared with only 0.45 activities by non–Tea Party Republicans. In 2010 House races, Tea Party Republicans performed on average 1.15 activities versus only 0.26 by non–Tea Party Republicans. As a result, Tea Party supporters were responsible for the vast majority of all campaign activity performed by Republican Party supporters in those campaigns.
Figure 10.1 shows striking divisions across a wide range of issues between Tea Party and non–Tea Party Republicans.5 On all issues, except limiting imports, a majority of Tea Party Republicans took one of the two most conservative positions, whereas on no issue besides Obamacare did a majority of non–Tea Party Republicans take comparably conservative positions. The mean difference across the ten issues is 32 percent. Remarkably, on four of the ten issues (giving vouchers to families, environmental regulation, abolishing the Department of Education, and abortion), non–Tea Party Republicans were actually closer to the Democrats in the sample than they were to the Tea Party Republicans.
Figure 10.1
Percentage taking most conservative positions on issues (CCES).
Factional differences on issue positions extend to the priority given to those issues. In figure 10.2, we show the percentage of each group that rates an issue as their top priority issue. Whereas more than a third of all Tea Party Republicans pick either “Shrinking Government” or “Repealing Obamacare” as their top priority, only 4 percent of non–Tea Party Republicans share their priorities. In fact, “Repealing Obamacare” is the second most important priority for Tea Party Republicans but is tied for last of the eight issue areas for non–Tea Party Republicans. On the other hand, jobs and the deficit dominate the list of priorities for the non–Tea Party Republicans with 60 percent picking one of the two, compared with only 40 percent of Tea Party Republicans. When asked directly which should be a higher priority, jobs or the deficit, almost two-thirds (63 percent) of Tea Party Republicans selected the deficit, while a majority (53 percent) of non–Tea Party Republicans selected jobs.
Figure 10.2
Top priority issues (CCES).
The rancor surrounding the fall 2013 government shutdown and debt-ceiling fights between Tea Party and non–Tea Party Republicans suggests that bridging issue differences and building a Republican consensus may be difficult, requiring compromise from both sides. However, when we asked respondents their position on the statement, “When we feel strongly about political issues, we should not be willing to compromise with our political opponents,” Tea Party Republicans were particularly resistant while non–Tea Party Republicans were much more open to compromise. In fact, almost six times as many Tea Party Republicans as non–Tea Party Republicans “strongly agree” with the statement (23 percent versus 4 percent), and almost twice as many Tea Party as non–Tea Party Republicans either “agree” or “agree strongly” (58 percent versus 32 percent). The combination of an issue chasm on both position and priority, coupled with a lack of agreement on tactics and compromise, helps explain the conflict within the Republican Party over the national debt and the government shutdown.
Because the factional divide within the Republican Party is characterized by greater activism among Tea Party supporters, it is not surprising that Tea Party candidates challenged more traditional Republicans and won primaries. We turn next to the FreedomWorks sample to shed additional light on the activist stratum within the Tea Party movement.
Examining the Tea Party’s Activist Base
Numerous academic studies show that it is the activist base that supplies much of the energy and manpower for parties and organizations, and explains party change (Carmines and Stimson 1989; Herrera 1995; Stone and Rapoport 1994; Claassen 2007). Carmines and Stimson (1989) are explicit in assigning a major role to activists in transmitting changes in party positions to a less-involved electorate. The role of Tea Party activists in recruiting and promoting primary challenges to incumbents and Establishment Republicans has been well documented (Berry, Sobieraj, and Schlossberg 2012; Skocpol and Williamson 2013). As Abramowitz (2011) finds by analyzing decades worth of ANES data, the emergence of the Tea Party movement at the grassroots level can be understood as an outgrowth of the increased conservatism of the Republican electoral base, especially the activists within that group.
Given the importance of Tea Party rallies and other Tea Party events in publicizing the movement (Madestam et al. 2011), the role of activists in showing support and transmitting the positions of the Tea Party are self-evident. In new movements, like the Tea Party, activists may be even more significant than identifiers in the population. As an important component of the Tea Party movement, FreedomWorks supporters are an additional lens through which to understand the Tea Party movement.
Numerous studies show that activists are more extreme than less active group members, just as party activists are more extreme than rank-and-file identifiers (Kirkpatrick 1976; Miller and Jennings 1986; Aldrich 1995; Stone 2010; Maisel and Berry 2010). Claassen and Nicholson (2013, 868) find that as a consequence of partisan and ideological self-selection, group members express more extreme opinions than nonmembers. Thus, claims about “astro-turfing” by Tea Party organizations like FreedomWorks might suggest wide disparities in the mass base and the organizational activists.
That FreedomWorks subscribers are organizational activists is beyond dispute. More than 80 percent of FreedomWorks subscribers have done at least one activity for the Tea Party (compared with only 20 percent of Tea Party Republicans), and more than half have performed three or more activities (compared with only 3 percent of Tea Party Republicans).6
Figure 10.3
Percentage of Tea Party Republicans (CCES) and Tea Party activists (FreedomWorks) taking most conservative positions on issues.
On the other hand, because of the unique qualities of the Tea Party movement (i.e., its strong ideological component and the rapidity with which it developed), it is unclear whether we should expect to find the same discontinuity between activists and nonactivists that Claassen and Nicholson (2013) suggest.
In figure 10.3, we compare Tea Party Republicans and the FreedomWorks sample. The gap we found between Tea Party and non–Tea Party Republicans dwarfs the differences between mass and FreedomWorks Tea Party supporters in figure 10.1. Both the Tea Party Republican and FreedomWorks groups are close to unanimous in their opposition to increased environmental regulation, affirmative action, and Obamacare. On all other issues, except for abortion and abolishing the Department of Education, the differences are less than 10 percent. The largest difference between the two groups is on abolishing the Department of Education, where more than 92 percent of FreedomWorks supporters either “agree” or “strongly agree” with the proposal but “only” 76 percent of Tea Party supporters in the mass sample did.
Figure 10.4
Top priorities of Tea Party Republicans (CCES) and Tea Party activists (FreedomWorks).
Figure 10.4 shows that Tea Party Republicans and FreedomWorks supporters are also quite similar in their issue priorities (again, to a much greater degree than Tea Party and non–Tea Party Republicans in the electorate). In fact, the only issues on which priorities differ by more than 5 percent are “jobs” (selected as the most important issue by 14 percent of Tea Party Republicans but only 8 percent of FreedomWorks subscribers) and “shrinking the size of government,” selected by 31 percent of FreedomWorks subscribers and 16 percent of Tea Party Republicans.
One other difference between FreedomWorks supporters and the rank-and-file Tea Party Republicans concerns partisan attitudes. While virtually all respondents in each group rated the Democratic Party as “poor” or “well below average,” Tea Party Republicans were less negative toward Republicans than FreedomWorks subscribers: slightly less than half of Tea Party Republicans rated the party above average, and only a third of FreedomWorks subscribers did.
Response of the Tea Party to 2012 Elections
As noted, GOP chair Reince Priebus initiated the Growth and Opportunity Project to focus on causes for the party’s defeat in 2012 and to help plot future strategy. In the first report from the Growth and Opportunity Project, there are thinly veiled criticisms of the Tea Party and the candidates it supported (Republican National Committee 2013). The report emphasizes that “our standard should not be universal purity; it should be a more welcoming conservatism” (5). It faults the Republican campaign message for failing to engage women, younger voters, and minorities, and it draws particular attention to Romney’s poor showing among Hispanics. It concludes that “we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only” (8). It calls for greater levels of pragmatism and less ideological purity by asserting “just because someone disagrees with us on 20 percent of the issues, that does not mean we cannot come together on the rest of the issues where we do agree” (8). These sentiments reflect the goal of Karl Rove’s Conservative Victory Fund initiative, which is to block future Akins and Mourdocks from winning Senate primaries while paving the way for less ideological and extreme candidates that have better odds of winning the general election. Rove faults the Tea Party for the loss of six Republican Senate seats over 2010 and 2012 election cycles (Zeleny 2013).
In contrast to this “establishment” view, 19 conservative leaders, including leaders in the Tea Party, wrote an open letter on the FreedomNow website, arguing that Rove was wrong in his attempt to “blame conservatives and the tea party.” Rather, they argue:
In 2012, the only Senate [non-incumbent] Republican winners were Jeff Flake, Deb Fischer, and Ted Cruz—all of whom enjoyed significant tea party and conservative support. Meanwhile, more moderate candidates like Tommy Thompson, Heather Wilson, Rick Berg, and Denny Rehberg went down to defeat despite significant support from [Karl Rove’s organization] Crossroads.” (ForAmerica 2013)
In early October 2013 during the government shutdown, past Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney attacked Ted Cruz for spearheading the attachment of anti-Obamacare provisions to the government funding bill; Cruz brushed off the criticism lightly, refusing to compromise (Kopan 2013). The conflict within the Republican Party spilled over into the 2014 primaries, with primary challenges to Lindsay Graham, Lamar Alexander, and even Mitch McConnell, all of whom were seen as too willing to compromise with Democrats.
Although self-identified Tea Party members of Congress since the election have shown little evidence of movement in the direction of the Growth and Opportunity Project recommendations, there has been virtually no in-depth attempt to assess changes in Tea Party supporters and activists over this period.
Figure 10.5 shows that FreedomWorks supporters had a very different view of causes of the Republican loss in the 2012 presidential election from the Growth and Opportunity Report. Almost twice as many thought that Romney’s not being conservative enough was a “major cause for his defeat” as though the lack of outreach to Hispanics was a major cause of his defeat; only 5 percent thought that his being too conservative was an important cause.7 Fewer than one in six (16 percent) thought Romney’s association with the Tea Party was a major cause of his defeat. In fact, those who either select minority outreach, Romney’s conservatism, his association with the Tea Party, or his campaign’s overconfidence comprise a smaller percentage than those selecting “Romney not being conservative enough” alone.
If Romney’s failure was an inability to make the case for conservative Tea Party positions, then there is little incentive to moderate. FreedomWorks subscribers showed no significant shift on immigration, an issue that received a lot of postelection attention from both the GOP report and Republican leaders like John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Marco Rubio. FreedomWorks subscribers also do not show any decline in support for an amendment banning abortion. In fact, in both cases there is a slight increase in the percentage taking one of the two most conservative positions. Overall, 43 percent took one of the two most conservative positions on both issues, up from 39 percent only 15 months earlier. The lack of softening on issues is but one example of a rejection of the GOP report.
Appeals for stylistic change toward greater pragmatism also failed to resonate. In the aftermath of the 2012 election, FreedomWorks subscribers were more purist and less willing to compromise than they had been in the prenomination period. While in December 2011 a third of FreedomWorks supporters (33 percent) strongly agreed that “we should not be willing to compromise without political opponents when we feel strongly about political issues;” by spring 2013 that had risen to almost half (47 percent), reflecting agreement with Ted Cruz who said in a Fox News interview, “I don’t think what Washington needs is more compromise. . . . I think what Washington needs is more common sense and more principle” (Latino Fox News 2013).
Figure 10.5
Percentage ranking each reason as very important as cause of Romney-Ryan loss (FreedomWorks).
Willingness to compromise to win “half a loaf” finds scant support in the FreedomWorks sample, which also applies to nomination candidate choices. More than three-quarters of FreedomWorks subscribers prefer a Republican nominee candidate “running well behind in the polls, but with whom they agreed on the important issues” over one who was even or ahead in the polls but with whom they disagreed on some important issues. This purism on issues and preference for ideological candidates clearly reflects a perspective that clashes with Establishment Republicans like Karl Rove, who put a much higher value on winning elections, even with ideologically suboptimal candidates. The purist views of FreedomWorks subscribers explain their refusal to support more moderate but electable Republicans (e.g., Richard Lugar in Indiana, Mike Castle in Delaware) in nomination contests in favor of their more ideological and extreme opponents (Richard Mourdock and Christine O’Donnell).
Dimensionality of Evaluations
This unwillingness to compromise extended to increasingly negative feeling toward Establishment Republicans including the Speaker of the House. Figure 10.6 shows that FreedomWorks supporters’ ratings of the Republican Party went from bad to worse between 2011 and 2013. Speaker Boehner, however, came in for the biggest fall, as the figure shows. While he was actually rated more positively than negatively in 2011, by 2013 his positive ratings had fallen by more than half and his negative ratings had more than doubled.
On the other hand, leading Tea Party senators such as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul received extremely high ratings, with more than 95 percent positive and less than 2 percent negative.
The fact that Establishment Republicans rate low and Tea Party supporters rate high might imply that both groups are being evaluated on a common scale—conservatism, purism, or just support for the Tea Party. If this were the case, a factor analysis would display a single factor encompassing evaluations of the full set of political figures. On the other hand, we might expect that there are actually two separate dimensions on which candidates are evaluated: an “Establishment Republican” dimension and a “Tea Party” dimension. Under this latter scenario, candidates could be high on both or low on both, or high on one and low on the other.
We ran a principal components analysis with varimax rotation, including evaluations of all the prospective 2016 Republican candidates as well as the Tea Party, Republican Party, and Republican congressional leaders. Strong support exists for the two-dimension model: one dimension captures Establishment Republicans such as congressional leaders Boehner, Cantor, and McConnell, Chris Christie, and the Republican Party, while evaluations of Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and the Tea Party itself define the “Tea Party” dimension.
Figure 10.6
Decline in ratings of the Republican Party and John Boehner, 2011–2013 (FreedomWorks).
In figure 10.7, we plot each of the figures in two-dimensional space based on their factor loadings. If we divide the plot into four quadrants based on factor-loading scores, it is clear that only two of the four quadrants are really occupied to a significant degree. Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan are the exceptions, being the only candidates who both load highly on both dimensions. They remain popular with the FreedomWorks sample (more than 85 percent positive and less than 10 percent negative) yet are linked to both the Tea Party and the establishment. Rubio and Ryan’s loadings suggest that under the right circumstances, a Tea Party candidate may be linked to Establishment Republicans without sacrificing his popularity, which may position them well to run for president in 2016.
Figure 10.7
Grouping of 2016 nomination candidates and Republican congressional leaders along establishment Tea Party dimensions.
Conclusions and Implications
Our analysis points to a party deeply divided between a Tea Party majority among rank-and-file identifiers and a more moderate minority. Under these circumstances, attempts by established leaders of the Republican Party to shed or tame the Tea Party are unlikely to succeed.
Instead, the chasm in issue positions and priorities presage continued conflict, particularly as the party moves toward 2016. The bitter factional conflict over the government shutdown, the debt limit, and the budget all present serious difficulties for a party trying to gain power, particularly when, for a significant part of the party, ideological purity trumps electability.
Although our study shows deep divisions in the Republican Party, massive defection by Tea Party supporters seems unlikely, even if the GOP nominates a more moderate establishment candidate. Reluctance to compromise on issues and a clear preference for nominating an ideologically appealing, if less electable, candidate does not transfer into an unwillingness to support the Republican nominee in the general election when the alternative is a liberal Democrat.
The 2012 election presents a case in point. Even though at the beginning of the nomination contests in December 2011, more FreedomWorks respondents said they could not support Romney for the nomination than said that he was their first choice, they supported him actively once he was nominated. As figure 10.8 shows, with the exception of Ron Paul supporters, at least 75 percent of FreedomWorks backers of 2012 Republican nomination losers were active in Romney’s general election campaign against President Obama. Even among FreedomWorks supporters who had rated Romney negatively in December 2011, 63 percent ended up being active on his behalf.
Figure 10.8
Percent active for Romney-Ryan in December 2011 by Republican nomination preference (FreedomWorks).
As much as Tea Party supporters have reservations about the Republican establishment and as much as they are willing to support Tea Party candidates for Congress in Republican primaries, the prospect of Democratic victory is unacceptable. In essence, the choice gets reframed from the nomination context, when Tea Party supporters vehemently support ideological soulmates, to the general election when a less attractive Republican runs against a Democrat.
Our findings have clear implications for the 2016 presidential election: bridging the factions within the Republican Party before 2016 will be extremely difficult, and a bitter presidential nomination contest between the “establishment” and Tea-Party wings is likely. Our data suggest that regardless of which faction wins the nomination, the general election contest will inevitably motivate Tea Party supporters to back the Republican nominee.
Notes
1. The NBC question may understate the number of Tea Party supporters. We use a question asking respondents if they are: strong Tea Party supporters, supporters but not so strong, former Tea Party supporters, or never a Tea Party supporter. The two “supporter” categories make up about two-thirds of Republican identifiers (63.4 percent), whereas the NBC survey completed around the same time (December 2011) showed only half of Republicans supporting the Tea Party.
2. The large sample size allows us to compare respondents who reported membership in FreedomWorks with respondents who reported membership in other organizations comprising the Tea Party movement. Based on a comparison of FreedomWorks members who belonged to other Tea Party groups, FreedomWorks email recipients are quite representative of prospective Tea Party supporters and activists.
3. By the AAPOR standards using the total number of subscribers, though, it is slightly under 2 percent.
4. The reason for having a smaller send out for wave-2 than the total wave-1 respondents is that approximately 6,000 had taken themselves off the FreedomWorks email list. Although there are some differences between those dropping out and those in the wave-2 mail-out group, such differences are consistently small. Across a set of 69 variables including all the issue variables, the political figure evaluations, all the activity variables (for both Tea Party and Republican candidates), attitudes toward the system, and all demographic variables, there are only three in which Somer’s d is greater than .05 and none in which it is as great as 0.08.
5. For each issue the scale was strongly agree, agree, slightly agree, slightly disagree, disagree, strongly disagree. We took the two most conservative positions and combined them for this figure. On immigration and import restrictions we define favoring restrictions on immigration and protectionism as the conservative position, although however we define “conservative,” the results are similar.
6. Activities included convincing someone to join a Tea Party group, attending a meeting, supporting a Tea Party candidate, joining a local group, joining a national organization, and contributing money.
7. There were eight items that respondents rated as being either “very important,” “important,” “not too important,” or “not important at all” for Romney’s defeat. On average, respondents picked as a very important reason for Romney’s defeat. A majority of respondents selected either one or two of the eight items as a “very important” reason. The items, in addition to the ones discussed, were voter fraud, Romney’s Mormonism, and the electoral college system.